


Finding Words

by Fialleril



Series: Words and Seeds [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-03 10:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4097740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fialleril/pseuds/Fialleril
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the desert, they find themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Splendid Angharad

**Author's Note:**

> I am fascinated by the use of words and silence in this movie, and by the way all the characters find their voices.
> 
> So this is a series about those little moments of voice. There will be one chapter for each of the eight members of the war rig family, all either expanded or missing scenes, posted in chronological order as they fit into the movie.
> 
> First up is Angharad!

It’s quiet in the hold of the war rig.

Well, not quiet exactly. Every beat of her heart feels loud and heavy, and she can hear the rasp of her sisters’ breathing and the occasional soft grunts of the strange man with his gun trained on her.

He’s already shot her once. She wonders, distantly, if he’ll do it again.

Angharad doesn’t like the silence. Sometimes she feels she’s been silent all her life, like the loudest words she’s ever spoken were written in white paint on her prison walls.

Cheedo makes a soft whimpering sound, and the man grunts again and gestures with the gun.

Angharad wants to tell him to stop, that they’re all in this together now, but she can’t be sure they are, really. He’s running from Immortan Joe just as much as they are, but that doesn’t mean as much as she thinks it should. And he’s terrified. Angharad knows all too well what people can do when they’re afraid.

Toast reaches for Cheedo’s hand, her movement unthinking, and the man grunts again, quiet enough not to be heard outside, but loud in the breathless stillness of the hold. Angharad shifts slightly, catches his eye, and gives him a slow nod she hopes is reassuring. She isn’t sure if it’s meant to reassure him, or the others. The man watches her, skittish and feral, but he doesn’t make any further move.

Toast’s hand grasps Cheedo’s and she squeezes. They wait in the silence.

Angharad decided a long time ago that she won’t go back. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what they are running to, but she knows what they are running from. Furiosa had said that out here everything hurts, but at least it’s a different kind of hurt.

She eyes the strange man and his gun, and watches him eye her in turn. Outside the rig, Furiosa is speaking in the even, deliberate tones that Angharad knows mean she has a plan. She watches the man Furiosa had called Fool tense, crouching and resting on the balls of his feet. The gun is still trained on her, but all his attention is for Furiosa.

Angharad meets her sisters’ eyes, and a wordless understanding passes between them. They all feel the charge in the air. They won’t go back.

Something spikes, jagged and piercing, in her stomach, and Angharad clasps her heavy belly and stifles a scream.

Everyone is looking at her. There’s concern and terror in her sisters’ eyes, and Capable reaches out unthinkingly as if to comfort her. She’s too far away, and there’s nothing she could do in any case, but Angharad is grateful. In this wasteland of silence they have each other. No matter what happens, no one can take that away. She won’t allow it.

She glances again at the man and his gun, and is surprised to find him wearing an expression nearly the same as her sisters’. He looks at her, his eyes asking silent questions, and she grits her teeth against the pain and nods back with only the slightest whimper. She will not be the reason they’re discovered.

He eyes her for a long moment, then nods in turn.

Furiosa has decided to trust this man, whether out of necessity or some other sense, Angharad isn’t sure. But she trusts Furiosa. She trusts Furiosa with more than just her life.

It’s gone quiet outside. The other women look back and forth at one another. Toast and Capable lean down just a bit more, trying to see through the opening of the hatch beneath the rig. Cheedo trembles, and Toast’s hand squeezes again around hers.

Furiosa yells, “Fool!” and the man is up and springing into the driver’s seat, moving so fast that Angharad takes a moment to realize she is no longer being held at gunpoint.

And then the rig is rumbling, roaring as it picks up speed, and Furiosa is scrabbling desperately at the hatch and kicking behind her at a man clinging to her legs. The others reach for her instantly, grabbing her arms and dragging her up into the rig. With one last vicious kick she sends the man flying under the rig. Angharad doesn’t watch where he goes after that. She is lifting Furiosa up, climbing up out of the hold and back into the cab.

The man drives on, gun in one hand and wheel in the other, and without a second’s hesitation Furiosa takes a gun and turns to fire on their pursuers. They fall smoothly into a wordless teamwork. The desert lights with gunfire and flame. It is not silent any more.

Angharad huddles together with the others. They have all seen the war boys chanting and massing beneath the tower of the Citadel, preparing for war. They’ve even seen the kind of injuries people come back with, sometimes. Angharad remembers Joe coming to her once, his breathing harsher than usual, his pockmarked side bruised and his arms slick with blood. She shudders.

But they’ve never been in the thick of a fight before. They’ve never driven the Fury Road.

She can see the fear in her sisters’ eyes, but Angharad finds she can’t comfort them. Her belly is stabbed with shooting pain, and her breath comes in short, staccato gasps. She’s afraid she might be having the baby. She’s never birthed before, but she’s heard how it hurts, and right now, her whole world is pain. Maybe Furiosa was right.

It’s too soon. She knows that much. Miss Giddy had said she would have another month and a half at least, and probably two.

Capable and Cheedo both reach to clasp her arms, pressing themselves closer to her and watching her in alarm. All around them, the world is loud with gunfire.

Furiosa sinks back into the cab, tosses a gun at her almost without looking, tells them to reload the clip.

Angharad has never loaded a gun before. She stares at it, this strange and dreaded device, this thing that plants anti-seed. She doesn’t know what to do. When they left, they had all agreed there would be no unnecessary killing. She’d known there would be some. She isn’t naïve. But she hadn’t thought there would be this much. She doesn’t know how many shots Furiosa and the strange, feral man have fired, but she knows that the majority of them have found their mark.

She’d managed to keep that war boy alive, though she wonders now what good it will do. Maybe it will even do evil. But she’s glad she didn’t let Furiosa kill him. She’s saved one life, at least.

Toast takes the gun from her and begins loading the clip, but she isn’t fast enough. Furiosa improvises, and then reaches for the flare gun. She has so many guns. Angharad wonders if they’ll have to use them all, before this is over.

But then the fuel pod flares up, and they leave it behind in an unfolding blossom of roiling black and blood red. For just a moment, she thinks that they’ve made it.

Then she sees Joe.

Her sisters surround her again, and they all turn to stare at him. Dag curses. Capable’s glare looks as lethal as one of Furiosa’s guns. Cheedo shrinks back against her, and Angharad presses her close, but her eyes don’t leave Joe.

He’s looking at them like they’re things. Stolen pieces of property. There’s an anger in his eyes that’s all too familiar.

He jerks the wheel, and she can’t hear his growl of rage but she can see it. He’s pulled nearly level with the cab. There’s a gun in his hand, and he’s aiming it at Furiosa.

Angharad doesn’t hesitate. She grits her teeth and ignores the pain in her stomach, crawling over her sisters to the door of the cab, flinging it open and placing her own body between Furiosa and the gun.

Capable’s arm stretches out immediately and holds her steady, anchored to the rig and to her sisters. She hangs in air, the wind whipping at her hair and the thin rags that are all Joe allowed them to wear, and glares across the space of the desert at the man pursuing them.

“That’s my child!” he screams at her. “My property!”

He doesn’t even see her. Only her swollen stomach.

Angharad stares him down. Thoughts and words are boiling up inside of her, coursing through her blood. She doesn’t speak them aloud. She doesn’t need to.

 _We are not things_ , she says with the slant of her body, the steady accusation of her gaze. _You cannot control me. You cannot kill her. I forbid you, and it’s my choice that matters, not yours._

Victory sings in her veins. They won’t go back. There is nothing in all this poisoned world that can make them. She has spoken.


	2. Toast the Knowing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's Toast! This one is full of headcanon back story.
> 
> Warnings as usual for reference to past abuse/rape.

Everything is silent except for the clink of the bullets. Toast keeps her eyes trained on them as she counts, but out of the corner of her eye she’s aware of Cheedo and the Dag, curled in on themselves in their grief. The bullets are a strange comfort, solid and real between her fingers.

Anti-seed, Angharad had called them. Toast thinks of her, smiling and triumphant as she reached to climb back in the rig. Triumphant because she’d defied him, used her body as a shield for Furiosa and won. Smiling because they were free.

The bullets clink together. She’s lost count. She grits her teeth and starts again.

Toast knows bullets. Not like Furiosa, no, and not like the strange, feral man who rides with them now, who helped them escape the canyon (but not all of them). She doesn’t know them in the intimate way of those who sleep with guns as with lovers, close and trusting and maybe a little (or a lot) terrified.

Toast knows bullets as the currency of her life.

As a child she’d played with them, or the used up husks of them, anyway. They littered the ground, plentiful as stones and far more plentiful than food. The Bullet Farm, the place had been called. She hadn’t known, until she met Angharad, that a farm was supposed to be a place where things grew.

_Anti-seed_ , she thinks again, counting bullets, counting, losing place, and starting again. _Plant one and watch something die._

Toast remembers Angharad, flinging open the door of the cab and shielding Furiosa with her own body, meeting their tormentor’s eyes with a long, unflinching stare. She had always loved and respected Angharad – they all had – but Toast thinks now that, maybe, she doesn’t agree with her sister on everything.

“No unnecessary killing,” Angharad had said, and maybe she’d been right about the war boy, though Toast isn’t so sure even about that. Maybe he’d been fooled by Joe and his lies, but there are others who don’t have even that excuse.

Toast counts bullets, and hopes that one of them is meant for Joe. Maybe more than one.

She wonders if she could be the one to pull the trigger. Toast knows bullets, knows the anatomy of guns (though it’s been years now since she had an opportunity to hold one). But she doesn’t know the firing of them. Not at people, anyway. Not at anything actually alive.

She counts bullets, and wonders if she could stare Joe down and squeeze the trigger.

Toast thinks maybe she could, and doesn’t know if that’s an insult to Angharad’s memory, or a testament to her own strength. It feels like both.

She steals a glance at Furiosa and the feral man in the front of the cab. They aren’t speaking, either. But maybe, Toast thinks, they don’t need to. She thinks of the way they’d fought together, back in the canyon: wordless, confident, trusting one another’s skills and moving as though they’d always been like this. As though they had everything to fear in the world except each other.

That’s a thought Toast can understand.

It was Angharad who first referred to them as sisters. That was before Toast had even come to the vault, but Capable had told her about it.

They were the first two, Angharad and Capable. They’d come together, gifts from Gastown for the favor of Immortan Joe. “Two for the price of one,” Capable had said, bitterly, and laughed a strange mirthless laugh.

“Hush,” Angharad had said, and she’d welcomed Toast with a smile like tears.

The Dag came next, not from Gastown or the Bullet Farm, but found, found somewhere in the waste, ragged and half-feral. Toast thinks sometimes that she still is that, half-feral, and she is glad. Dag is Dag. It would be terrible if Joe ever managed to make her someone else.

And then there was Cheedo. Cheedo who was the newest but had been there the longest. Born in the Citadel and raised with a special destiny, separate, apart. She’d always known she would be Immortan’s wife.

Toast had never had sisters before. She’d never had anyone, really. In the midst of her horror she’d found something beautiful, the only beauty she’d ever known, and she’d sworn to herself that she would protect them however she could.

She fingers the bullet casings between her fingers. So many, but not enough, she knows, not enough. It will take a miracle to get them through this.

She hasn’t told the others. Cheedo is desperate enough already, trying to run back to the only thing she’s ever known, and the Dag would just hum something odd and dark and laugh, maybe. Capable could take it, probably, but Capable has always been strangely, _impossibly_ hopeful, and so she’d probably just say, “You never know, Toast. We might make it. Don’t give up now, not after everything.”

And she’d have a point. Toast doesn’t want to give up. She _won’t_ give up. But that doesn’t mean she’s got any real hope.

Still…

She sets the last of the bullets aside and delivers her report to the front of the cab, inventory complete. Furiosa says nothing in reply. The fool only grunts.

He’s good at that, Toast thinks, viciously.

The Dag and Cheedo are still huddled together, still so quiet. They all learned long ago how to cry without making any noise.

Toast sets the satchel of bullets aside carefully. She considers the rifle in her arms for a moment, hesitating, before she lays it on the floor next to the bullets.

The fool isn’t watching her. He shot Angharad, and Toast tries so hard not to think that that’s why she –

She stops that thought. It was Joe who killed Angharad. It’s always Joe who hurts them. She won’t do herself any good, blaming anyone else.

Wordlessly, Toast shuffles across the small gap left by Capable, wondering briefly what her sister is seeing as she looks out from the back of the rig, what answers she may find in the desert. Toast thinks if there are any answers at all, they must be right here, in this rig.

She reaches out her hand and takes Cheedo’s, squeezing their fingers together. Cheedo whimpers and then fairly launches herself at Toast, her body wracked with silent sobs, her face warm and wet against Toast’s shoulder. Toast rubs her hand up and down the other girl’s back, kisses the top of her head.

She doesn’t bother with soothing words. Toast decided a long time ago that when you love someone, you don’t lie to them.

She sees Furiosa watching them from the front of the cab, through the mirrors, and she raises her chin but she doesn’t take her arms from Cheedo.

“I want you to teach me how to shoot,” she tells Furiosa.

Furiosa studies her for a long time, not turning around but watching Toast through her mirrors. She’s looking for something, and she must find it, because finally she nods.

“All right,” she says.

Toast breathes out. It’s not quite a sigh of relief. She doesn’t know what it is, exactly. But she knows that if she gets the chance to put a bullet in Joe’s skull, she’ll take it.

It’s not Angharad’s way, maybe, but Angharad is dead, dead because of Joe, and Toast won’t let him hurt any of them again.


	3. Cheedo the Fragile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter deals a little more closely with past rape and sexual abuse, though there’s still nothing explicit. And lots more headcanon back story in this one again.

Cheedo feels as though she’s made of glass. Fragile, Joe had always called her, almost fondly, in the same way that a collector is fond of the delicate little trinkets lined on his shelf. Cheedo the Fragile. She’s never felt it more strongly than now.

The rig is strangely quiet in the dark. Cheedo huddles together with her sisters, holding a light between them, a lantern burning in the desert night. It was Capable who lit it, Capable with silent tears running down her face and a fierce tremor in her voice as she said, “My mother used to say the lights guide people home. To – to the Great Mother Below.” She’d whispered that last bit, strange and reverent and trembling. Cheedo has never been sure she believes Capable’s stories about the Great Mother Below, but she understands the light in the dark, and maybe that’s enough.

Cheedo never knew a mother. She can’t really imagine what motherhood means, other than the strange, sad, determined look in Angharad’s eyes when she touched her swollen belly, or the slow, listless movements of the Milking Mothers, their eyes dull and far away.

Furiosa calls the Green Place the land of many mothers, and Cheedo thinks maybe that’s why she’s starting to hate hearing about it. (It’s not because Angharad is – it’s not it’s not it’s not.) She’s heard far too much about mothers.

What Cheedo knows is sisters. Sisters, and a husband.

She’s aware, distantly, that maybe her experience with her sisters isn’t really what it’s supposed to be like. But sisters protect each other, she thinks, and they’ve always protected her.

She knows the things that Joe does – did – to the others. They didn’t tell her about it, usually, and she’d never wanted to know the details, but she saw them after, held them sometimes, or helped with healing herbs and salves. Cheedo has a gift for healing. After the first few times following her arrival in the Vault, the others started hiding their injuries more, pretending at perfect health, until Joe or his horrible sons left and they could ask Cheedo to look at them, without fear of the Organic Mechanic and his vicious cures.

Cheedo was called the Fragile, but she didn’t get hurt like the others. They protected her.

When she first came to live in the Vault, she hadn’t yet had her first bleeding. The other four were there already, sisters in unspoken bond, and they took her in like a long lost friend.

It was Toast who came up with the idea. Toast has always been full of ideas, ideas and anger. They burn in her like a fire, so bright that sometimes Cheedo has to look away. (They are all her sisters, because that is the only word any of them know, but Toast, Cheedo thinks, Toast is different. The things she feels about Toast are not the same as the things she feels about the others. They’re not more, though. Just different.)

On her seventh moon in the Vault, Cheedo’s blood came. It came at night, sudden and aching between her legs, and she’d woken the others with her sobbing. They’d all gathered around, held her, petting her hair and running soothing hands over her back.

All but Toast, who stood up fierce and straight and said, “We’re going to hide it. We won’t let him find out. We won’t let him touch you.”

Cheedo gives a mighty sniff now and looks up from the lantern at each of her sisters. None of them are really looking at each other, but their arms around one another, around her, speak more eloquently than any words. They’re all so strong.

The Dag, she thinks, is like a flag on a tall pole, all long legs and streaming hair, and she bends in the wind and then stands again, unbroken. Capable is like stone, her arms solid and strong and warm as the sun. Toast – Toast is a rush of mighty water, roaring and angry and leaving life in her wake.

And Cheedo is glass.

For four months the others had all conspired to hide her bleeding. They’d taken her used rags and put them by their own beds. They’d surrounded her at inspections, distracted Corpus Colossus when he came to do their check-ups. Once, Angharad, Splendid Angharad, had even taken Joe by the arm, blinked her beautiful eyes up at him and pressed close and then led him away, away from Cheedo, away from his questions.

She’d sobbed that night, sobbed in her sisters’ arms the tears that Angharad refused to shed.

“I’d do it again,” Angharad had whispered fiercely. “I _will_ do it again. He can’t stop me. He can’t stop me from protecting you. It’s my decision, and he can’t take that.”

That wasn’t the first night she’d told them they weren’t things. But it was the first time she spoke of escaping. It was the first time Cheedo had dared to hope.

And now Angharad is dead, and Cheedo – Cheedo had tried to run back to him. To ask his _forgiveness_.

She shivers now, and her sisters’ arms wrap more closely around her. She wants to push them off. She wants to scream into the silence of the night, scream the way she’d screamed Angharad’s name before, scream “No!” and “I didn’t mean it!” and “I won’t go back, _I won’t_!”

She doesn’t, though. The desert air is silent and thin under the burning stars.

“We don’t blame you, you know,” says Toast, suddenly and softly, her hand clasping Cheedo’s own. “For being afraid. It’s all right to be afraid.”

“We’re all afraid,” says Capable, gentle Capable who only hours ago had held her arm with a grip like iron and said, over and over again, “We are not things. We are not things.”

Cheedo sobs. “I’m sorry,” she whispers into the night. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to go back.”

“Course you don’t,” says the Dag, rubbing Cheedo’s arm and smiling her strange smile. “We know that.”

“And anyway,” Toast says with sudden fierceness, “you’re not the only one who’s thought about it.”

Cheedo jerks away from them, startled and nearly falling onto the floor. They are strong and brave, like Angharad. Not like her. How could they –

“What?” she whispers.

“We won’t go back,” says Capable. “Not for anything. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t thought about it.”

“War boys aren’t the only ones that schlanger’s tried to fool,” the Dag spits. “But they get inside you, lies. They grow in here like anti-seeds.” She taps the side of her head, white hair fluttering. “And we’ve been hearing the lies a lot longer than we’ve heard the truth.”

The truth is that they aren’t things. Cheedo knows this, believes it with all she is. It was Angharad’s constant mantra. But…she’d only been saying it for a few moons. And Cheedo has known her whole life that she was meant for something great, meant to be the Immortan’s bride.

She looks at each of her sisters now and sees, maybe for the first time, that they’re just as afraid as she is. Maybe that should only make her more afraid – they’re adrift in this wasteland together, with no real knowledge of the world outside the vault Joe had kept them locked in, with only Furiosa’s strength and determination to guide them and the strange, feral man who shot Angharad but who now rides with them, who’s already protected them more than once.

It should make her more afraid. Instead, it sets her free.

“We won’t go back,” she says, steel beneath her whisper, and meets each of her sisters’ eyes. “Not for anything. He can’t control us anymore. I won’t let him.”

The Dag cackles in delight, and Capable smiles a smile almost like Angharad’s, quick and bright with victory. Toast squeezes Cheedo’s hand roughly and says, “He’d better watch out for you.” She’s grinning, too, a twisting, teasing thing that makes Cheedo feel both warm and powerful.

She doesn’t say anything else. There isn’t anything else that needs to be said. But she settles back into the huddle of her sisters’ arms, feeling somehow lighter now, and she thinks, _Sisters protect each other_. And she’ll protect them, with everything in her. For Angharad, for all of them, even for Furiosa and her fool. And for herself, too.


	4. Nux

The desert is wide and cold and silent in the blue dark, and Nux stares out at it, watching for lights, listening for gunfire, and thinking about death.

He shivers. The woman – Capable, her name is Capable – had pressed the tarp closer around him before she left, told him to keep warm and stay hidden, and she’d think of something.

He believes her, he thinks. That she’ll think of something. He already knows they won’t kill him. They’d had a chance once before, but the Splendid One, the one who is now dead because of him, she’d stopped them. Nux doesn’t understand why she stopped them. He doesn’t understand Capable either, Capable who should have killed him, should have at least alerted the others, but who instead had put her head on the floor with his, had touched him, a barely there touch, not like anything he’d ever felt before, and said that it was his manifest destiny not to die.

He doesn’t understand her, but he wants so badly to believe her. To believe that maybe he has a purpose, that maybe he really was spared for something, that Immortan –

He shudders, a full body tremor, and it aches in his bones and where Larry and Barry press against his throat. He doesn’t want to think about Immortan.

He’d been chrome. He’d been awaited. He was meant to go to Valhalla, carried in Immortan’s own arms. But now –

“We won’t go back to him,” she’d whispered, Capable with her soft hands and her eyes strong and warm as a V8 engine. “We aren’t things. We aren’t his to own.” And she’d watched him, softly still, and said, “Are you going to try to make us, war boy?”

And he’d said, “No.” He can’t. Of course he can’t, not now. He’s mediocre. The Splendid One is dead, because of him. He can’t go back.

He stares out at the desert and shivers again because – because he doesn’t think he even wants to.

The other war boys had said – _Immortan_ had said – that they’d been stolen. That Furiosa had gone rogue, had taken them, had dared to insult the Immortan and steal his treasures. And Nux had never wondered why. It wasn’t a war boy’s job, to wonder. The Immortan gave the orders, because he was strong and wise and he would guide them, and it was their job to obey.

His fingers reach up and brush over his lips, softly, softly, just the way she did. He still tingles there, his body still tensed and ready, expecting a blow. It’s always a blow, isn’t it? In the kennels they’d kicked and scratched and bit, and on raids they fought and died, and with Slit it was always shoving and punching and jostling, the dull thud of heads knocked together and snarling teeth. In the kennels he was always watching his back.

But her touch had been – soft. That’s not the right word, not really, but he doesn’t know the word that is. She hadn’t hurt. He doesn’t think he’d known, until that moment, that it’s possible not to hurt.

She’d asked him his name, and he’d told her, because it had never even occurred to him that he could lie to her or refuse her. And then she’d smiled and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Nux. I’m Capable.”

And he, foolishly, still struck off balance by the softness of her touch, had blurted, “Capable of what?”

She’d laughed, but not at him. Her laugh was like a secret, a joke she invited him to share, and he’d just stared at her, awed, and she’d said, “Capable of anything.”

He believes her.

And she said Furiosa hadn’t stolen them. She said they’d gone because they wanted to. Because they hated the Immortan, because they weren’t things to be kept and used, because they were people and people should be free.

He stares out at the blue-dark desert and thinks about that word. _Free._ And he thinks about death.

She hadn’t been disgusted, when he told her how he’d three times failed to enter Valhalla. She hadn’t been sad, either. She’d smiled at him, and said, “I’d say it was your manifest destiny not to,” like that was a good thing, like she was glad. Like she wanted him to live.

He can’t imagine why.

But Valhalla is closed to him now, and he’s not certain – he’s not certain –

Beneath him, the rig swerves suddenly, flailing like a war boy running on empty, thin and weak, staggering across the sand. The wheels squeal, and they send something flying up from beneath them, something thick and viscous.

It’s mud. Nux knows this word. He knows this place.

The rig stops, and there’s a scramble of movement outside. He can hear the Imperator giving orders, the squelching sounds of people moving in the wet sand, the heavy thud of the spare tires being thrown away. He shifts and ducks back fully inside the rig. Capable told him to stay hidden.

The clamor lasts only a little longer, and then they’re moving again, but not soon enough. Immortan will catch them, Immortan’s vehicles can cross the mud better, they’re faster, not like the huge war rig, they’re –

The blue darkness lights with sudden fire. Nux remembers, with sharp clarity, that Imperator Furiosa is very clever. (He even remembers, so long ago, when he was still a pup without a name, bragging to the other pups, shoving and laughing in the kennels and saying that someday, he would drive with Imperator Furiosa’s rig, because they all knew she was the fiercest of the Imperators, and he was going to ride with the best.)

But the mud only thickens and deepens the further they go, and the weight they’ve lost is not enough. Nux knows it won’t be enough.

Soon the rig is floundering again, the tires sinking and spitting. And then it stops, and the Imperator and Capable’s – sisters, she’d called them sisters – are outside again, and he can hear them grunting and pushing, hear the Imperator giving orders again. They’re trying to use the engine plates to dig out the wheels. It might even work. But it will take a long time.

Nux risks another glance out the back of the rig. There are lights clear in the distance now, and he can hear faint gunfire, growing closer. They’ll be caught, and Immortan will take his treasures back, and he’ll kill Furiosa and the Blood Bag and Nux, too, probably, they’ll all die mediocre and the gates will be closed and –

And Capable is not a thing. She told him that, lying on the floor of the rig and looking at him like no one else ever had before, like he was Nux and she was Capable, Capable of anything. She’s not a thing, and her sisters aren’t either, and that means Immortan is wrong.

Immortan is _wrong_.

The thought dizzies him, makes him feel like he’s running on empty and full-up with high octane blood, all at the same time. For a moment he almost can’t breathe.

Then he feels the rig jerk and settle once more beneath him, and hears the others cursing outside, and the nearing of the guns, and he’s up and crouching, moving through the underbelly of the rig, nearly running to the cab.

Capable told him to stay hidden. She said she’d think of something. He believes her, and he hopes she’s thought of it, whatever it is, because he can’t hide anymore.

He crawls up and into the cab, and it’s empty, and he doesn’t think too much about it, because everyone says thinking’s never been his strong point and he doesn’t have the time. The engine revs under his hands.

Then Capable is at the door, staring at him, hissing, “Nux! What are you doing?”

He thinks of so many things he could tell her. “Immortan is wrong,” he could say, or maybe, “You won’t go back and I don’t want to let them take you,” or even “You’re Capable and I’m Nux and I don’t think I want to die anymore.”

He doesn’t say any of those things, though. Instead, he says, “I can help! I can help!” He can feel himself nodding frantically, watching her wide eyes. “I want to help.”

She looks at him, and then she smiles. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Baby Nux absolutely hero worshiped Furiosa and no one can convince me otherwise.


	5. Capable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for references to rape and abuse, though nothing explicit. Again, lots of headcanon back story in this one, as well as worldbuilding.

Capable remembers her mother.

Her name was Whisper, and she was a storyteller. She knew all kinds of stories and all kinds of secrets, and she used to pass them on to Capable, and to Angharad sometimes, too.

They’d always been together, Capable and Angharad. They grew up together, hidden away in the People Eater’s bunker in Gastown. They’d been told that they were meant for Immortan Joe, to be his treasures and bear him healthy sons – told so young that it seems, now, that Capable has always known what her fate would be.

But Whisper’s stories were different. She passed them on to Capable in the quiet and the dark of the bunker, when the other women and girls slept and the People Eater and his lieutenants weren’t likely to visit them. He usually came during the day. Sometimes, he’d come for Whisper, and he’d leer at Capable and laugh as he led her mother away.

But at night the bunker was theirs, and at night Capable’s mother told stories.

They are sacred secrets, those stories. Capable guards them closely, choosing who she will pass them on to and when. It’s something that belongs entirely to her, that choice. No one can take it from her.

She’s shared most of her mother’s stories with her sisters, and they’ve shared some of their stories with her, too. It was how they clung to themselves in the Vault, how they reminded themselves that they are people and not things. People share stories.

Nux doesn’t really know any stories. At least, not any that aren’t about blood and glorious death and the road to Valhalla. Capable knows that’s no accident. Her mother taught her about stories. Words, Whisper used to say, can remake the world.

Immortan Joe’s world doesn’t have room for any stories that aren’t about death. She knows this all too well.

So she tells Nux some of her stories. He soaks them up with wide eyes and naked wonder, like a man dying in the desert who’s suddenly come upon a huge lake full of clear, sweet water.

They’re sitting in the lookout atop the rig. Nux had claimed first watch, eager to be useful, and Capable went with him, because she –

Well, she knows why, she thinks. Maybe the others know why, too, but maybe they don’t. She isn’t sure she can really explain it if they ask. But Nux is like a reflection, distorted, broken in ways that are different from her brokenness, but not so very different. He’s the first man she’s ever felt safe with.

He’s too warm even in the cold of the desert night, his skin almost clammy, and he’s trembling slightly where she leans against him. She wonders if this is what the night fevers are.

She pulls back, away from him, wrapping her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. He looks…confused, maybe even a little panicked, like he’s done something wrong, and she smiles to herself as she says, “You’re burning up. I don’t want to make it worse.”

“Oh. It’s okay. I’m used to it,” he says, with a shrug as though it doesn’t matter. But his smile is shy and a little embarrassed as he adds, “Not used to this.” He waves a hand in the space between them. “I never thought – never thought I’d meet anyone as shiny as you.”

Capable scowls at him, tugging the blanket even closer around her. “Don’t call me that,” she snaps. “That’s _his_ word. I’m not a thing, to be called shiny.”

He winces and drops his gaze. “Sorry,” he mumbles, and then, “Don’t know any other words.”

She studies him for a long moment. Down below, the others are getting ready to sleep, curled around one another, Toast and Cheedo pressed close together, Furiosa surrounded by the women of the Vuvalini, and the Dag still awake, sitting close to Toast and Cheedo now and singing softly under the stars.

“Well,” Capable whispers. “Why don’t you tell me what you mean, and maybe we can find a word together.”

He perks up like a wilted plant after a watering, and she wonders if all war boys are like this, really, underneath all the terrifying paint and the shrieks about Valhalla. She remembers Angharad saying he was just a kid, but she doesn’t think she’d really believed it, not then.

Finally, Nux says, “You know so many things, so many stories, and you’re strong and brave and you make me think I want to live and – ”

He’s blurted all of that out and now he has to catch his breath, and Capable is feeling a little breathless herself, because that’s not at all what Joe meant, when he called them shiny, his perfect treasures to be protected from the world. It’s a lot more than she thought Nux meant, too.

“And,” he says, “you don’t hurt.”

She blinks. “I don’t hurt? What does that mean?”

Nux lifts his hand, but he doesn’t touch her. He leaves it hanging there in the air between them, hesitant and even trembling a little, with the night fever or with something else, she doesn’t know. But he waits there until she nods at him, consenting.

And then he touches her mouth, softly, with two fingers. “You don’t hurt,” he whispers. “Everyone else does. But not you.”

He pulls his hand away, but Capable doesn’t know what to say. She thinks of her mother’s stories, of the one about a girl called Clever who escaped a warlord’s prison with the help of his own dogs, because she was kind to them and they turned against their own master when she needed them most.

She knows that the young war boys are called pups, but is this really all it takes? For someone to show them just a hint of gentleness?

Nux says, “What’s the word for that?”

Capable laughs. It’s the second time he’s made her laugh in as many days, and it feels…good. It feels freeing.

“I don’t know, Nux,” she says. “That’s an awful lot of meaning to fit in just one word. But maybe we don’t need a word for it. Maybe it can just be.”

“Okay,” he says, nodding happily, and she leans back against him, even though he’s still so warm. But he’s shaking less now. Maybe she’ll ask Cheedo tomorrow if she knows anything about night fevers.

“Capable,” he says, suddenly and so quietly that at first she thinks it’s only the wind, or her own imagined memory of her mother’s voice.

“What?” she whispers back.

“Do you – ” She can feel him swallow. “What do you think happens, when we die?”

It’s not an unexpected question. She’s a little surprised he hasn’t asked before. Valhalla is closed to him now, he believes, and earlier he’d confessed to her, urgent and shaking, that even if Immortan would take him back, would carry him straight to the gates of Valhalla, he wouldn’t go, not now, because Immortan was _wrong_.

But they both know he’s dying. It’s the first thing she really learned about him, even before she learned his name.

And she has an answer. This is an old story, one of the oldest, and one of the closest secrets. Her mother had whispered it to her in the dark, tales of freedom and green and the promise that not even the People Eater or Immortan Joe could hold them forever. They have a last refuge that no one can take from them.

She never even considers that she shouldn’t tell Nux. This is a secret hope for those who have none, and he is like her that way.

“My mother told me about a place,” she breathes. “A place we go when we die. Not like Valhalla. The Great Mother Below the Earth receives us, and heals us, and in her world everything is green and peaceful and no one is a slave.”

She turns to look at him then, and he’s staring at her with desperate wonder. His voice is a scratchy, jagged thing. “That sounds nice,” he whispers.

“Angharad is there now,” Capable says, choking just a little. “She said she wouldn’t go back to him and she didn’t. And now she’s in a green place.”

His arm wraps closer around her, and he hesitates. “Do you – Do you think I – ”

“Yes,” she says fiercely. “Yes. When you die, you’ll go to the Great Mother. But you don’t have to leave us just yet.”

“Okay,” he says, smiling like he’s not afraid of anything anymore, and he falls asleep like that, still smiling.

Capable takes the next watch, and she thinks about her mother’s stories. Tomorrow, they’ll begin their crossing of the salt. Maybe they’ll find something green and new on the other side. Maybe they’ll die in the desert, and the sand will cover their bones. Maybe she will see Angharad again sooner, and maybe later.

For now, though, she’s free, and she has hope, and that’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ties in with my fic [Green](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4030465), where Nux does indeed go to the Great Mother Below.


	6. Furiosa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a bit more violence in this one than the others, and reference to Furiosa's stab wound.

She is going to die.

Furiosa knows this, with the slow, steady knowledge of someone who has seen too many battles, who knows wounds more intimately than people. Her side is an agony of fire, and she can hear the whistle of air through her open lungs. Maybe she shouldn’t have pulled out the knife.

She had to, though. She can’t move, can’t fight effectively, otherwise. And she needs to.

Furiosa is going to die, but that’s the very least of her concerns right now.

The many mothers are few now, and they’ll be fewer still, before this is over. Maybe none of them will survive. She thinks it could be worth it, if the sisters make it back safe to the Citadel, to build a new world with seeds and words and gentle strength.

But none of that can happen while Joe lives. She knows that. She’s known that all along.

And now…

Now, Angharad is dead, and Joe has Toast, and she doesn’t know what’s happened to Valkyrie but she hasn’t seen the bike in a very long time. And the fool is somehow, impossibly, driving the People Eater’s car. She wonders if that will last. She thinks, with the detached clarity of those who are perfectly focused on the moment, or just bleeding out, that he has a bad track record with cars. She thinks she may have actually destroyed the one that used to be his.

But that’s not important. She’s losing too much blood, and her focus is swimming, and she knows she won’t be able to drive the rig much longer. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to, anyway. She’s needed elsewhere.

She won’t let Joe take Toast. She won’t let Joe take any other woman ever again.

Nux is still coughing and taking ragged breaths, and she’s afraid he may have swallowed some of the guzzoline, trying too desperately to boost their engines. He’s dying too, but not as fast as she is, and for now he’s in better shape, at least for driving. So she gives him the wheel and heaves herself out of the cab and across the gulf between her rig and Joe’s massive car.

Maybe a part of her has always known, even hoped, that there would be a reckoning someday. The thought sustained her through the long, brutal days away from her family, when the Green Place seemed to grow further and further away and she began to doubt that it had ever existed at all. When she woke one morning to find that she was forgetting her mother’s face, forgetting after only five hundred and sixty days. When she killed and pillaged and drove the Fury Road and did what she had to do, to work her way up to Imperator, to a war rig, to a real chance at escape.

And now she has escaped, and she’s going back.

Furiosa remembers, a very long time ago, almost nine thousand days ago, her initiate mother saying that the strength of the Vuvalini lay in their manyness, in the community of women and the ways they cared for and protected one another. Furiosa knows it’s true because for seven thousand days she has known its absence.

In the Citadel she was alone. There were few other women in the war parties, and they mostly kept to themselves, closed off, doing whatever was necessary to survive. They were captives, like her. Joe never allowed the women of his own people to fight. They were breeders, or milkers, or they were the wretched who worked themselves to blood and bone and died unknown in heaps beneath the Citadel.

But some of the captive women were made to fight. This was not a mercy.

Furiosa remembers her own initiation to the Citadel.

Her mother lived three days after their capture, just long enough to see the Citadel and to spit in Immortan Joe’s face. Her body they gave to the Organic Mechanic, for his studies, and Furiosa did not see her again.

But she carries her mother’s words with her always. On the three long days of their journey in chains, her mother held her hand in the dark hold of the rig and whispered the stories of their people, over and over again, until Furiosa had them all memorized, until they could never be taken from her.

After he killed her mother, Joe had turned to her and laughed. “She wants to fight,” he’d said, chuckling, like it was just a little bit of amusement, like he had nothing to fear from her. “So let her fight.”

And they threw her in the kennels with the war boys.

She wasn’t meant to survive. She knows that. And she knows that Joe wonders how she did.

He’s told himself that she was strong, or even that he made her strong: a woman with the heart of a man. She knows he thinks that, because he’s called her that to her face. As though it should be a compliment.

And now she’s bleeding out, her hands slipping for purchase on the car, and Joe has his gun trained on Toast but he doesn’t seem worried, not really, because what can one woman do?

That’s where he’s wrong. That’s where he’s always been wrong. Furiosa isn’t alone.

Cheedo reaches out a hand to help Furiosa up.

She takes the hand and surges forward, no time to stop. Toast is waiting in the cab, terrified but ready to act when her chance comes. The others are in the rig behind, and the fool – the fool is here to get the goons off her back.

They don’t need any words, she and the fool. She knows him as well as she knows herself. They’re the same, in so many ways.

She can trust him.

She leaves him behind, heaving herself onto the side of the car, reaching for Joe.

The car shudders and jolts, and she nearly falls. Nux has rammed them. She can’t chance a look back, but she knows he must have good reason, and that means she doesn’t have much time.

There’s a harpoon on a chain dangling beside her. It will do.

Once, she was brought to the Citadel in chains. She was thrown down into the kennels in chains, and the war boys learned to fear her even while she still wore them. When they brought her up, when they brought her out after she’d survived, Joe had cut the chains from her himself and told her that it was he who had freed her.

And Furiosa remembered her mother’s words. She remembered her mother’s last wish for her. _Survive._

So she hadn’t spat in his face. She’d thanked him, and accepted a place in his army, and she worked her way up all the time planning her escape, and then planning to take his wives with her, because she was one of the Vuvalini, of the many mothers, and their manyness was their strength, and she could not leave these women behind.

She grips the harpoon in her hand and lunges. It snags in Joe’s mask as he turns to face her, and the hooks hold. The chain runs taught between them.

For over seven thousand days, Furiosa has been screaming. Now, she lets her scream sound aloud.

_“Remember me?”_ she snarls, and rips her chains away.


	7. The Dag

The Dag hadn’t said much, when they’d all decided to go back to the Citadel instead of crossing the salt. To her mind one choice is as uncertain as the other, and the only real difference is in what they want.

Across the salt, maybe, they’d find green, or a place that could become green, could nurture the Keeper’s seeds. But maybe they wouldn’t find anything, and then it would be their bodies planted in the sand and left to nurture whatever clinging, desperate things could grow from their ragged bones.

In the Citadel they know there’s green. But they also know there’s the Wretched clamoring for water and food, and Corpus Colossus and his lieutenants left behind to cling to their power, and all the little white-painted boys clamoring for death. Even if they make it past Joe and his fleet, they’ll be running back to a siege. And maybe they won’t make it back at all.

The Dag knows this. She’d accepted it when she cast her vote for the Citadel, because they aren’t things, and they don’t want to go back, but no one else is a thing either, and she’s starting to think that maybe she can’t be free while other people are still in chains.

She thinks that Furiosa agrees, that she must have agreed all along, even if she didn’t say it. Why else would she take them with her when she ran? Why else would she and the fool be talking about redemption?

The Dag doesn’t think she’s looking for redemption, though. She’s not sure she even knew what she was looking for, not until the Keeper showed her that bag of seeds.

The Keeper is holding that bag now, clutching it tightly in her nerveless fingers like it’s the only thing in the world that matters. Her blood is soaking into the satchel.

The Dag feels herself spinning, her mind cloudy and the world strangely silent. There’s an anti-seed planted in the Keeper’s body, or maybe more than one, and it's growing in blossoms of red.

The Dag presses close to the Keeper, her hands reaching to hold the old woman, to clasp the bag of seeds between them.

It’s a strange truth of her life, that she’s never actually seen death. Angharad was taken from them, ripped away by the wind and the roar of engines, and though the Dag knows she’s dead, she didn’t see it. She can’t imagine Angharad dead, Angharad who was always so fierce in herself and unconquered.

She knows that her family is dead, too, but she doesn’t know when or how. They were all taken in the wastes, taken by howling skull-faced war boys, and she never saw them again, never, never. Toast used to say they were probably used for their blood, used up and thrown away, and Capable and Angharad would scold her for saying it, but the Dag appreciated it. Information, even painful information, is power, and power is freedom.

But she’s seeing death now. The Keeper is still breathing, her hands still clenching around the bag of seeds, but the Dag knows she will never plant them. 

She’s only partly aware of what’s happening around them. Cheedo and Toast are in Joe’s monstrous car, and Furiosa is there too, Furiosa with a sucking wound in her side and her own blood on her hands, still climbing, still fighting, still unbowed. She won’t die, the Dag thinks, maybe a little desperately. She can’t imagine any world in which Furiosa could die.

There’s a terrible scream, and something goes flying from the car in front of them, something red and wet and bound in chains. She looks at Capable and their war boy, Nux, but neither of them seem to understand, either.

Then she hears the cry go up. Immortan Joe is dead.

She sees Capable’s face slacken, maybe with surprise, maybe with relief. Nux’s face is caught somewhere between terror and something that might almost be joy, and the rig swerves, just briefly, before he pulls his concentration back.

They have to go. The Dag can see that. There’s no staying on this rig, not if they want to escape. She clambers up and over the seats, climbs up to the top, not really thinking at all, just surviving. Surviving. She’s always been good at that.

But she looks back, and sees the Keeper, her face a strange picture of peace surrounded by death, and in her lap the satchel of seeds.

The Dag knows that she’s considered strange, flighty, half-detached from the world. It’s why she’s called the Dag, after all. But she’s also practical. The Keeper is dying, her breath already slowing and shallowing, her limbs already growing cold. And there is no point in carrying a body with them. A body is only a husk, weight that will slow her down, and she won’t take anything of the Keeper with her that way, anyway.

Her eyes fall on the bag of seeds.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she goes back for them. They are real, they are life. They are the Keeper, the only thing she would want the Dag to take. They are the hope of the world.

So she takes the bag, pulls it easily from unresisting fingers, and climbs out of the cab.

But she pauses a moment on the other side. She looks back. The Keeper seems almost to be smiling now, her eyes closed but her face turned toward the Dag, as if in benediction. The Dag presses her hand against the glass. She doesn’t say anything. There are no words for this.

And then she turns to go. Capable is still in the cab, but Capable has her own farewells to say, whether they know it or not. The Dag may not be very well acquainted with death, but she knows consequence and sequence and the way things are in the world. She looks back, just once, just briefly, and meets Nux’s eyes, and she can see that he knows, too.

It’s enough. She won’t insult any of them by waiting.

Capable joins her a few moments later, and what follows is fast and jumbled and terrible. She stands beside her sister, and they look back, at the rig burning, and Rictus roaring, and Nux pointing at Capable with a trembling hand and eyes that aren’t afraid at all, not anymore. She watches Capable reach out, watches her sister clasp her hand in the Vuvalini sign of remembrance and respect, and she looks back to the rig and to the place where the Keeper still sits, a soft smile still on her face.

The rig flips magnificently. The pass crumbles behind them in a shower of stones and fire. And the desert covers over them, folds them into its stony silence: the Keeper of the Seeds and Nux and, she supposes, Rictus too, but she doesn’t want to think about him so she doesn’t.

They’re buried in the earth like seeds, and the Dag looks back and wonders what will grow from them, from their lives and their deaths. It won’t be nothing. These seeds will take, she decides. These seeds will grow and flourish and they’ll be remembered in a better world.

She presses the satchel close against her chest, pulls it open and sifts the seeds through her fingers. There are so many. So many different kinds.

She’ll plant them all. She’ll water them and speak to them and watch them grow. She knows who killed the world, but she knows, too, how they’re going to resurrect it.


	8. Max

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is shorter than the others, because even when he finds his voice, Max is a man of few words.
> 
> Warnings for references to blood and needles in this one.

He’d almost forgotten his name.

Out in the wastes, he didn’t need it. There was no one to call him by it, except the ghosts, the voices twisting and slithering in his brain. He wasn’t sure, always, if they called him that because it was his name, or if it was a curse, some obscure but certainly deserved malediction.

She’d asked him his name in the canyon, and he’d replied with a grunt. Maybe she thought he didn’t trust her, couldn’t risk giving her his name, and maybe she was right. But maybe he couldn’t have told her even if he’d wanted to.

She’d named him Fool, and that was right enough. He hadn’t objected.

They all have names, everyone in their little party, though it took him a while to realize. Out in the wastes, names aren’t important. He just needs to know what’s a threat and what’s not.

So there was the pregnant woman, who’s now dead. And the other four. And the war boy. And Furiosa.

Hers was the first name he learned, a name full of fire and rage that fit her well, except when it didn’t. He’d never asked her for it. She just gave it to him.

Maybe she knew he needed it.

That night, above the salt, she’d sat with him and told him all their names. Toast and Cheedo and the Dag and Capable and Nux, and Angharad who was dead. He hadn’t understood why. They were leaving in the morning, and he wasn’t. He would be alone again. That was safest. That was – 

But he hadn’t left. And now she’s dying.

He isn’t thinking quite clearly, but then he never is, so he doesn’t let that bother him too much.

He apologizes when he reinflates her lung. It hurts. He knows that too well. But she only grunts a little, and he tells her, inanely, that it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s fine now.

The old woman of the Vuvalini knows her stuff, even if she isn’t full of very optimistic thoughts. She’s already written Furiosa off as dead, he knows. Maybe he should too. He’s reinflated her lung, but it won’t last, and she’s lost far too much blood. There’s nothing he can do about that. There’s nothing –

She grunts, makes some noise up at him, and he raises her off the ground and close to his ear, so he can hear her whispered words. Last words, maybe. He remembers, vaguely, that there’s something important about last words.

“Home,” she rasps against his neck. “Take them home.”

He doesn’t think he can. He doesn’t have a home, doesn’t even know what the word means, really. He told her that they could find some redemption together, and he meant it, but he knows he can’t do it alone. There is no redemption without her. He can’t – 

He turns his head, and sees the tube curled there on his shoulder.

She’d read his tattoo for him, out there above the salt. He’d asked her to, because he needed to know what they’d done to his body, and because he didn’t trust anyone else, not really. He’s not sure when he started trusting her. But he knows, now, that he trusts her more than anyone else in the world. More than he trusts himself, certainly.

_Universal donor._

That’s what he is.

He scrabbles with the tube on his shoulder, searches desperately for the needles. It’s never a question of what he’ll do. He has too many ghosts already. Furiosa won’t become one of them.

He passes the needle and the end of the tube to the Dag, instructs her how to thread it, punctures himself without a second thought. He hardly even feels it.

His blood runs true, as it always does. He winces more as the needle pricks her skin than he did for his own. She’s not talking anymore, but she is breathing, the inflation of her lungs holding, and his blood running red through the tube and into her arm. Aqua vitae, he thinks, distantly.

Furiosa is going to live. She’s got to.

He bends low over her, feeling lost and found all at once and whispers the words she’s given him, the name she’s returned to him, so she’ll know.

“Max,” he says, and he is. “My name is Max. That’s my name.”


End file.
